Marlowe Tolfell| 19 | Female

Appearance:

Marlowe isn't considered conventionally attractive. Her hair is thick and gray and riddled with split ends, despite being kept short above her shoulders. Her eyes are dark and tired looking. Her pale completion and pointed chin can make her look like a doll, and in Marlowe's opinion her button-nose is one of her only cute features.

Marlowe stands at an intimidating 5'0" and is built like a little stick man: flat, skinny and tiny. Not exactly built for life in prison TEF-149. Multiple, pearly-white scars cover her arms, legs, face and every other visible part of her body. Most, if not all of the scars, are tiny and hard to see. Because her skin is so pale they almost blend in, but not quite.

She has a mole on her right shoulder and a birthmark on her butt. ;B

Powers:

Pain manipulation: Marlowe can manipulate her body's ability to feel pain. More specifically, she can both amplify and numb out her pain by messing with how her brain registers it. This is very hard to control, and seems to work more subconsciously than anything else. Maybe with training she could use it on other people, too?

Sickness (anti-healer): She can cause sickness in herself and others, as long as physical contact is involved. There doesn't seem to be a difference between the different kinds of illnesses, but there's a lot about this ability that Marlowe doesn't understand yet. It would be more accurate to say that Marlowe causes symptoms rather than actually causing sickness (i.e. she can cause a fever but can't cause pneumonia.), however if she were to get good at using her powers maybe she could do more than that. As of right now all she can really do is give someone a cough or fever, or maybe make 'em puke.

Weaknesses/Limitations:

Her inability to control her powers makes her prone to hurting herself unintentionally. She spends most of her time unable to feel pain, which is a lot scarier than it sounds. Half the time she doesn't even know she's been injured, so she lets wounds go untreated (it's the main reason she's covered in teeny little scars). She also gets herself sick without meaning to, but it's less common because she finds that ability naturally easier to control.

When she does focus on using her powers, it's extremely draining. She'll usually become nauseous and suffer from hot and cold flashes for a while after using her abilities for long periods of time. Another side effect is a loss of pigmentation, so far it's been limited to her hair. Her eyebrows and eyelashes also have a few gray patches.

Progress:

N/A

Personality:

Marlowe is reckless and blunt, even when she doesn't mean to be. She's naturally bold and pushes situations, and herself, to the limit. A lot of people mistake her for being rude because of the way she says things, so she's never really had someone her age that she was close to, and spends a lot of her time day-dreaming. After being taken the wrong way one too many times, she became very awkward and self-conscious about what she's saying, and stopped trying to make new friends. It only encouraged her playful imagination. At heart, she has a goofy sense of humour, she's a little bit of a dork, and loves to try new things. One of her goals was to travel around all the different Districts by herself, but there's no way of that happening now. She's good at "handling" uncomfortable situations by zoning out.

Backstory:

Marlowe grew up in a nice house hold. Her parents always seemed a little emotionally detached, but they were also extremely over protective of her. It's not like they were bad parents, they just weren't the kind that you could talk to openly. Very judgmental. From a young age, Marlowe was encouraged to hate Mal's. It wasn't something that came up often, but whenever it did they were very stern about Marlowe agreeing with them. For a long time, she thought it was natural. It wasn't until she was older that she realised her parents had their own reasons for being so resentful: they'd had another child before, and he tested positive his first test and was executed. But she didn't find that out until she'd started to develop her own abilities.

At school she felt invisible. She didn't have any bullies, but she also didn't have any friends. She wasn't picked on, but she was never invited to parties and she always ate by herself. The combination of growing up an only child and her isolated school experience made her an expert day-dreamer. She grew to love long car-rides and window seats, and she became comfortable in her own head. Unfortunately, it only made it harder for her to make new friends. She didn't have much of a filter and hated long-winded conversations. Even though Marlowe wasn't rude, she was definitely blunt and her lack of smooth social skills only encouraged her to keep to herself.

It was her third year of high school when Marlowe started experiencing problems with her body. Err -- more problems than the average teenage girl had with her body. Random bruises turned into random scabs turned into random gashes she couldn't remember getting. Her first ability was starting to manifest itself. Brief periods of time where she wouldn't be able to feel any pain were followed by lots of tests at the doctors, lots of questions from school and parents, and Marlowe never had any answers for them. Even though it was worrisome these occurrences came few and far between, and they didn't exactly scream "weird magic power" so much as "strange medical occurrence". Marlowe didn't realise for a long time that it was an ability, because for almost a whole year it was completely subconscious and hardly ever happened.

She took her fourth test and tested negative.

Marlowe started getting allergies all the time. Or maybe it was food poisoning? Or maybe she was sick. The doctors found it hard to diagnose a fever of 103 that came and went within a 24 hour period without any medication. They found it even harder to explain to her overprotective parents that nothing was wrong her, or at least nothing was wrong with her that they could figure out. Marlowe was becoming more and more suspicious of herself. Was it just a funny coincidence that her symptoms usually showed up when she was thinking about getting sick? When had she become such an unhealthy and frail girl? She wasn't sure. But sometime between her 3rd year and her graduation, she figured it out.

She was terrified, but she didn't say anything to anyone. Marlowe did her best to not even say it to herself, in the privacy of her own head. When her last test finally arrived, she knew she wouldn't pass, but she hoped that because she had never said anything it would somehow not be true. Just unwarranted superstition.
She tested positive.

Talents/Skills:

Marlowe doesn't have useful wilderness skills, physical training, or even a smooth tongue. She's recently realised she's... kinda useless? But she can: A. Keep fighting past the usual restraint of pain (but this is also a bad thing, she doesn't know when to stop for the good of her own body); B. She's very flexible. Because she knows she's prone to hurting herself accidentally, she spends a lot of time stretching in order to avoid unnecessary injuries; C. She's very adaptable and takes to new skills quickly.

Quirks/Habits/Other:

She's lip-biter and a scab-scratcher.

TL/DR:

Marlowe is full of contradictions: introverted, but bold. Sickly, but able to control illnesses. Her life wasn't especially bad or good, and her powers showed themselves in strange ways. For a long time she didn't even realise she was a Mal, and her very last test landed her in District 1's Training and Education Facility.